Blogging: January 2009 Archives
Hi! I'm a blogger!
It's no secret that I haven't been all that visible here over the last year or so. I've been averaging one or two posts a month and haven't really been all that focused on updating the content of this site. There's a couple reasons why:I just haven't had much to blog about, especially since I have self-censored the things I put on this site, and I just haven't had the energy to blog what I can let myself blog about. Does that make much sense?
It's ironic for someone who positions themselves as a blog scholar that they'd shy away from posting to their blog, and I can't say exactly why it is I might be doing so. I just don't have an urge to communicate through the blog, even though I have stuff that I could talk about. Like work, where we're working on some really interesting projects and I'm feeling like I'm exactly where I need (and want) to be. And some interesting stuff has come up with those projects as well, such as the work I'm doing with Moodle and Elgg. Of course, maybe it's only interesting to me, and there's aspects that I can't (or probably shouldn't) talk about in order to maintain some distance from the more sensitive parts of the job.
Part of the problem is that I don't have a clear idea of what I want to do with this site or this blog in general. I'm not freelancing on a regular basis as I have in the past, so there's no real need to maintain a professional site (though I do still have the studio page up just in case). But I don't want to keep a personal blog, since K isn't comfortable with me talking about her online -- which makes perfect sense, given that she is a public figure as an instructor, and has to have control over her online presence -- and I'm not comfortable with sharing my life online as much as I have in the past. Never mind the fact that my life just isn't all that interesting lately, especially with K living in BC -- there's just not much to write about, unless you want stories about how I spend my evenings watching old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and avoiding looking at the basement or the kitchen (or the dining room and upstairs office, which have piles of stuff from downstairs in them).
There is some interesting stuff I'm learning in my job that I want to share though, like my last entry about code reviewing and project management. I'd also like to share some of the things I've been looking at outside of work as well, like a topic I suggested to Dr. Martha Nell-Smith for inclusion in a panel at Digital Humanities 2009 on using social networking tools to better promote and increase usage of digital humanities tools (and likewise, a paper I've submitted to Digital Humanities Quarterly railing against how the tool makers haven taken over the field and need to move aside and let the humanists in to play).
Another part of the problem is that I know that most of the readers of this blog, the few that there were, have gone away because it's been so long since there was any compelling content here. The people that I would want to keep in touch with through the blog I already keep in touch with via other means, such as IM, email, or Facebook. So I'm not writing anything for them. Of course, there's no other audience. I haven't built a strong online persona that would bring people to the site, and the work that I do has more of a local, offline influence (funny, since I not only work for an online university, but also research online culture).
Were I to go back to my thesis on online identity, I'd say that the audience isn't necessarily important; the blog could be used as a mirror for my own identity to help me work thoughts out. But then we get back to not wanting to share my life online, especially where it intersects with K's life.
The end result is that I just can't visualize who my audience is, or would be, and that leaves me in a sticky position as to what to write here. If you're still reading this site, what are your thoughts? Do you still blog (I know a couple of you do), and if so what/why? What would you want to read here? What have I written in the past that has caught your interest and made you want to come back (I assume it's been a long while since there's been something of interest).